Institute named after Adam Smith defends new taxes, central planning

While Adam Smith is turning in his grave

A vast majority of the staunch advocates of the climate panic are left-wing people and left-wing institutions. But I was just amazed by a fresh Forbes article called

iPads on a Plane and Why a Carbon Tax Would Solve Global Warming

by Tim Worstall, a fellow at the Adam Smith Institute in London. You would think that this is a free-market think tank analogous to CEI or Heartland Institute or Czechia's CEP or others. You would be wrong. At least one fellow of this institute is much closer to the Union of Concerned Scientists and other far left-wing NGOs.




Tim Worstall honestly admits that he is marginally involved as a supplier to a project whose goal is to reduce the weight of Airbus airplanes by 2%. This piece of information makes it somewhat more natural – as well as somewhat less ethical – for him to defend a carbon tax that could force companies such as Airbus to be more enthusiastic about (and more willing to pay for) contracts that Tim Worstall is marginally involved in.

This think tank crew member defends a carbon tax at $80 per ton of CO2, more than an order of magnitude higher than the current price of the European carbon indulgences. Given the fact that even the small European fees are already harming the economy (while doing nothing to reduce CO2 emissions: USA is actually the world's greatest CO2 emissions reducer since 2006), an increase of these fees by an order of magnitude could resemble the bankruptcy of PIGS on steroids.



The heritage of Adam Smith, a Scottish pioneer of the philosophy of the free market capitalism, is being contaminated by a think tank carrying his name that has much closer to hardcore left-wing ideology and crony capitalism.

He also praises a Singapore airline's decision to lend iPads to passengers while removing a heavier entertainment system. This has contributed to the reduction of the weight of the airplanes by 7% although the contribution from the iPads isn't quantified and could be tiny. (The replacement of old entertainment systems by iPads could be a good or not-so-good idea but whatever the answer is, it clearly has nothing to do with CO2.) Despite his self-evident financial interest, Worstall presents the reductions of CO2 emissions involved in literally every motion of your life with the enthusiasm of a true believer. For example, look at this:

There are hundreds of thousands, millions, of actions that can be taken each of which will reduce emissions a little bit.

Wow. So in his ideal world, the carbon tax would be calculated and paid for "thousands, millions of actions".

You will lend an iPad to someone and he will have to file a tax form to regain some taxes for CO2 emissions that were either added or subtracted because of some convoluted chain of processes and real as well as hypothetical influences. (Clearly, most of the money circulating in these taxes would be all about tricks and fraud: it can't be otherwise if you try to assign a – negative – price to a gas that is present in every cubic centimeter of the air, quadrillions of tons in total.) Is this Gentleman joking? He is clearly proud that he wants to help to introduce a system that is as intrusive as possible and that wants to cripple the human freedom literally in every, arbitrarily small action we do. The only justification is a fabricated criticism of CO2, the most important gas including carbon, the key element of life, and the vision that its emissions will be lowered by several percent. Even if emissions were lowered by 100%, it wouldn't have a detectable impact on societies and ecosystems, surely not a positive one.

The final paragraph of his text escalates his fanatical anti-free-market rhetoric:

In short, the reason for a carbon tax is that we don’t have any other method of coordinating something as large and complex as human society.

Wow, so the goal of a fellow at the Adam Smith Institute is to coordinate something as large and complex as human society. I can't believe my eyes. According to Adam Smith, the processes in a functioning society are coordinated by the invisible hand of the free markets, not by arrogant omnipotent individuals who can and do impose tax on anything, including breathing and indirect transfers of CO2 caused by an iPad, and who suck a part of the revenue into their pockets because they're marginal suppliers to projects that help companies to avoid this tax. Doesn't Tim Worstall realize what sort of an incredibly immoral, devastating, and corrupt setup boiling down to omnipresent conflicts of interests he is promoting? The only silver lining in Tim Worstall's essay is that we may finally place socialists, communists, liberals, and progressives into tiny prison cells where they wouldn't move and where they could reduce their CO2 emissions. The reason we can "coordinate the whole society" in this way is that we no longer need any leftists if we have "free marketeers" such as Tim Worstall.

Which means that if we do want to coordinate society to a lower carbon emission future then we’ve simply got to use the price system. There is no other way.

The only problem is that we, the people who haven't lost their minds, don't want to "coordinate society", especially not to a lower carbon emission future which would mean a lower-living-standards future. Even when we look at the whole mankind, the people in the world obviously don't want to march to the future with lower CO2 emissions. When all the real and believed positive and negative effects associated with CO2 are counted, the people actually prefer CO2 emissions to exponentially grow. The fact that they actually grow in the real world is a proof of this assertion of mine and a proof that Worstall's claim about "what we want" is a lie. Only power-thirsty folks who want to harm the people of the world (and perhaps benefit out of it) may want something else.

So there definitely exists another way: to acknowledge that the climate panic is an irrational hoax and to denounce and/or punish the individuals who promoted or even benefited from this insanity. Those who want to reduce CO2 emissions will have to find a way that doesn't terrorize or rob other people or strips them of human rights, freedoms, and dignity – by new taxes, new tax forms, forced group think, and the pollution of newspapers and magazines they have to read by dishonest pseudointellectual garbage similar to this essay by Tim Worstall.

Mr Worstall, you should be deeply ashamed, especially because your institute dares to use the name of Adam Smith in its name, the same Adam Smith who is turning in his grave right now.

And that's the memo.

Armageddon delayed by 10 years

Many predictions of a looming doom have been made in recent decades. For example, in 2006, Al Gore articulated the consensus of 197%-198% of scientists and said that the planet would die by 2016.

Now it's 2012 and the "scientists" have moved the planetary collapse to 2025.

This shifting of the date seems almost identical to eschatology of Jehovah's Witnesses except that it's shifted by 100 years into the future. The witnesses believed the end of the worlds to come in 1914 or 1918 because that didn't work or 1925 because that didn't work either (not to speak about previous dates 1799, 1874, 1878 which had the same fate).

Will the shamelessness and dogmaticism of global warming catastrophists surpass that of Jehovah's Witnesses and will they just move the date after 2025, too?